What can you say about Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay's big, loud, dumb, boring mega-movie - apart from Oof and Ouch and Aaargh and Zzzzzzzzzz? What response is there, apart from a yelp of incredulous dismay every five minutes? What historical insights can it offer - apart from the blinding revelation that maybe Steven Spielberg's 1941 wasn't quite that bad after all?

Fundamentally, the movie offers a vision of what Titanic might have looked like if the iceberg was a warlike Jap. It's a tremulous love story about a triangle of pretty young people in historical costumes - two best buddies and the cute nurse they both love - set against the mighty backdrop of war, planes, shooting, guns and ammo: a chick flick and a guy flick.

Ben Affleck is Rafe, the square-jawed, cubic-headed US army pilot who is temporarily away in England, winning the Battle of Britain single-handed. If you thought that the war in the Pacific would be one second world war story which didn't need time out to patronise the Brits, you were wrong. The RAF squadron leader, soaking his stiff upper lip in a pint of limey warm brown beer, is overcome with gratitude for Ben: "If there are any more like you, God help anyone who goes to war with America!"

Meanwhile, back in sleepy, peaceful Pearl Harbor, his comrade Danny (Josh Hartnett) is making time with Rafe's girl Evelyn (Kate Beckinsale). And so the emotional balloon goes up just as the sneaky Jap bombers arrive at 7.55am, December 7 1941.

Affleck, Hartnett and Beckinsale give performances of such somnambulist awfulness that the three of them achieve an almost zen-like state of woodenness. This is bad acting above and beyond the call of duty; this is Purple Heart bad acting. And Cuba Gooding Jr, playing the African-American fighting man forced through prejudice to be a cook, is so camp he could be in Village People.

Never at any time does director Michael Bay give any hint of the real human cost of war. At least Saving Private Ryan made an honourable attempt to show the ugliness of violence: the sweat, the pain - and the fear and hatred of the enemy. But all Bay requires of Ben, Josh and Kate is to look cute or, as it might be, overjoyed, or troubled.

The effects are indeed impressive, no question about it, and for the recreation of the attack itself there are some breathtaking scenes of what a warship looks like from the point of view of the bomb that's about to sink it. But the whole thing is an effect: the drama, the people, the emotions, everything. When Affleck and Hartnett take to the skies in their fighter planes in a feisty but doomed attempt to repulse the enemy, they looked like no one so much as Will Smith seeing off the aliens in Independence Day. It had about as much relationship to the reality of wartime combat as a Gap ad for khakis.

As for the Japanese themselves, the film smoothes away both America's "yellow peril" racist invective and the realities of Japanese nationalist aggression: a kind of bogus two-way political correctness, somehow as insidiously offensive as anything else. The Japanese themselves are carefully drawn as a kind of modernised, New Labour Jap enemy, tough on the causes of foreign devils: they are thoughtful, almost regretful about launching the attack. On being congratulated on his brilliant strategy, the Admiral says sadly: "A brilliant man would find a way not to fight the war." There's even a shot of one Japanese pilot desperately signalling to baseball-playing kids to take cover before his duty to the Emperor compels him to reduce them all to ashes.

And it is the thought of being reduced to ashes that brings me to the most curious part of this film. After Pearl Harbor, the movie's final act is to show Hartnett and Affleck spearheading the retaliatory raid on Tokyo on April 18 1942, commanded by Lt Col Jimmy Doolittle (improbably and plumply played by Alec Baldwin) - a desperately dangerous mission. I won't give away what happens, but suffice it to say that Kate's final voiceover gestures towards the end of the war, informing us that this was the decisive turning point. "America suffered, and grew stronger," she says, "through the trial we overcame."

Uh, yeah . . . ? Is that how America overcame? Through the "trial"? The one moment which really excited me in Pearl Harbor was when President Roosevelt (Jon Voight) rises miraculously from his wheelchair to show what can be achieved if we really try. Aha, I thought, is this a brilliant ironic reference to Peter Sellers' mad Nazi scientist in Dr Strangelove, who rises from his wheelchair and shrieks: "I can WALK!" just as the nuclear anti-miracle is unfolding? Is producer Jerry Bruckheimer going to hint at a big historical truth: that Pearl Harbor led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Nope - no mention of it. As far as multiplex audiences are concerned, America's key response was that gallant, symbolic little raid on Tokyo, and naturally suffering and growing stronger - not the vaporisation of civilian populations.

What can be done about this film? I would suggest some sort of campaign of civil disobedience. But maybe we should just take cover as best we can as the bombs of stupidity and dullness and silliness detonate above our heads - $75m at the US box office in the first weekend? For you, Tommy, the war is over.